Tuesday, February 3, 2009

SSPX Leader Franz Schmidberger: 'Today's Jews Guilty of Deicide'

Werner Cohn, on his blog FringeGroups, posts the following excerpts from a letter written by Franz Schmidberger, the head of Germany's SSPX group. The letter was written in October 2008 and posted to the SSPX website.

With the death of Jesus on the cross, the old covenant is abolished. The Church now encompasses all peoples, cultures, races, social classes. With that, not only are the Jews of our days not "our elder brethren in faith," as the Pope maintained in a visit to a Rome synagogue in 1986. They are, rather, guilty of the murder of God, insofar as they do not embrace the divinity of Christ and accept baptism, the only actions that would distance them from the guilt of their forebears. But Vatican II maintains, wrongfully, that the sufferings of Jesus cannot be attributed either to the Jews of His days nor to the Jews of our days (§ 4).

This is an excerpt from a letter sent by Fr. Franz Schmidberger to the Roman Catholic bishops of Germany in October 2008. Fr. Schmidberger is the German head of that very Society of St. Pius X (SSPX) whose members have now been re-admitted to full communion in the Roman Catholic church by Pope Benedict.

(NOTE: For those of you not following this news story, the SSPX is a so-called "traditionalist Catholic" group which rejects the innovations of Vatican II. It has a long history of promoting anti-Semitism in the form of Christ-killer imagery and conspiracy theories involving Jews and Freemasons. Mel Gibson is the most famous adherent of "traditionalist Catholicism". A.H.)